My roommate almost burned down our house in College. He wanted to fry potatoes and put an inch of oil in the pan and turned the heat on. Then he went to smoke a joint and ended up passing out.
By the time I got there, the flames were a foot high, burning the oven hood. I carried the fiery pan to the driveway, grabbed a bucket of water, and dumped it on.
Water and oil don’t mix. The water closest to the fire gets vaporized, becomes airborne, and pushes the oil away. That’s a fancy way of saying that it turns a grease fire into a fucking fireball. My dumb ass didn’t know this at the time.
Imagine you’re a firefighter. It’s your first day on the job. The alarm goes off. You rush to the house. Inside, a big pan is on fire. You turn off the heat source and spray the fire with a dry chemical fire extinguisher.
Once the fire’s out, you tell the family that next time it happens, pour on baking soda, cover the fiery pan with a metal pot, turn off the heat, and let it suffocate from a lack of oxygen and self-extinguish. Then you kiss a baby, pose shirtless for a calendar, and do whatever else I imagine firefighters do.
In a group of experienced firefighters, you’re a newbie. Compared to them, you feel like an imposter. But you knew not to put water on a grease fire. Sure, you might get laughed at by other firefighters but nobody you helped cared because you solved the problem.
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It’s not what you know: Successful coaches haven’t memorized more peer-reviewed research than unsuccessful coaches have. They didn’t necessarily get better grades in school.
Did you ever wonder why some nutrition coaches do very well while others barely make a living? Successful nutrition coaches don’t necessarily know more about the metabolism than other nutrition coaches. Most people don’t know enough about nutrition to begin to evaluate a coach on the basis of their nutrition knowledge.
How likely are you to check what your financial advisor’s ranking was back at business school? I’ve never done it. My confidence in his ability has nothing to do with how well he did as a business student.
Don’t let your perceived inexperience or perceived inadequacy related to your peers stop you. Your client doesn’t need your advanced knowledge. Odds are they already know what they should be doing. Your success as a coach depends on how good you are at getting them to do what they already know they should do.